Pandemic doesn't slow Innovation Foods' appetite for growth

Before the coronavirus crisis hit, Innovation Foods in Twinsburg, as seen in this 2016 photo, delivered roughly 7,000 breakfasts and lunches to schools and senior centers across Northeast Ohio. Still, the company is seeing a high demand for its orders.

Tom Lane's business is school lunches.

That's why Lane, owner of Innovation Foods in Twinsburg, finds it "frustrating" to watch nearby public school districts "kind of fumble," he said, on figuring out how to feed students in need while they shelter at home.

"Honestly, my feeling is, 'How about you just let us do this for you, because we can do it cheaper and easier than you can do it?' I admire the spirit that a lot of them are showing in trying to get these programs up and running, but that is just not what they are built for," Lane said. "But it is what we are built for."

Innovation Foods normally makes and delivers roughly 7,000 breakfasts and lunches a day to schools and senior centers across Northeast Ohio, with a footprint spanning from Lorain to Youngstown and Cleveland to Canton. While Lane noted that the 7,000-meals-a-day figure — up from 3,500 in 2016 — is pre-coronavirus, he said growth on the senior center side of its operation and newer orders as a result of COVID-19-fueled emergency meal distribution sites are largely compensating for losses as some of his school clients discontinue meal service during closures.

"We are getting ready to double in size from this year to the next, going from producing 7,000 meals per day to about 14,000," he said. "We just purchased a new building in Twinsburg Township, actually picking up the keys on (March 24), that will take us from 10,000 square feet to 31,000 square feet."

Lane launched Innovation Foods in 2010. At the time, he owned Red's Place, a Twinsburg catering business, and New Adventures, a day care with sites in Twinsburg and Mantua. Red's was already supplying meals to New Adventures when mounting interest from other child care centers persuaded Lane to transition from catering to school lunches.

In 2013, he moved Innovation Foods out of Red's building on Darrow Road into a nearby 5,500-square-foot industrial space on Midway Drive. Three years later, the company was producing 3,500 breakfasts and/or lunches for more than 36 schools and community centers and adding on to its leased Midway facility.

The latest relocation, to a previously vacant building on Enterprise Parkway, will accommodate anticipated growth as Lane and his team are what he called "front-runners in a few contracts" currently held by an unnamed competitor that Innovation Foods has been successful at unseating in the past.

"They have a frozen-food model where they ship everything in frozen from out of state," he said. "We focus on local food and local preparation, so that typically we can do it at the same prices, but it will be an infinitely better quality product."

Lane said Innovation Foods' first public school pilot is another promising sign. School business to date has been with charter schools and day care facilities. Earlier this year, however, it began delivering meals to students in the East Cleveland City Schools.

He also notes growth among its senior program clients, like the community center in Bedford Heights, where the company drops off 100 meals a day.

Along with higher output, the Enterprise Drive plant will permit Innovation Foods to add in-house capabilities it previously lacked due to space. Chief among those are an apple-slicing and packaging line.

"We found over the years that kids will eat apple slices, like you get in Happy Meals or something, but if you hand them an apple, they won't eat it," Lane said. "And for us, it will translate into our senior citizen program where some of our seniors don't have the dentition to eat a regular apple."

At the new facility, Lane added, the company will be able to bread its own chicken tenders from fresh chicken and make its own meatballs and hamburger patties out of fresh beef. All of that supports Innovation Foods' mission to create minimally processed meals sourced primarily from local vendors such as Erie County's Quarry Hill Orchards, Wayne County's Gerber's Poultry and pizza dough from Dough Go's out of Canton.

"The only way to do that quality level of a product is to do it ourselves," he said. "Otherwise, you are stuck buying in-processed product and there is nothing that sets us apart."

Lane estimated his food business, which employs 65, hit $3.5 million in revenue in 2019, with year-over-year growth rates hovering between 20% and 30% in recent years. He still operates the two day care centers as well. Those cleared about $2 million last year.

The day cares were running at about 30% capacity last week before the governor's order went into effect that child care centers must be granted a temporary pandemic license to remain open. Lane said he has been able to utilize some New Adventures personnel at Innovation Foods, making meals for emergency food distribution sites. The same day he talked with Crain's, for example, Innovation Foods staffers were prepping and packing 13,500 turkey sandwiches for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's distribution effort.

"We also just set up a free meal program with Solon Senior Center, which was really on a tight budget. So we are basically doing it at cost," Lane said.

The biggest challenge has been getting the word out that his company is available as an emergency resource.

"We put a message on Facebook and our website landing page telling any program in need to give us a call. We will help you find funding, work with you if you already have the funding, and if not, sell it to you at cost," he said.